Our Budget film

Their Oscar night looked uncannily like the trailer for our Budget day. And, no, it’s not only because our revenues have been plunging with the recklessness of necklines at LA’s Dolby Theatre. Just as Yashwant Sinha did when he filled our Feb-end TV screens, P Chidambaram will again cut a dashing figure as he rises to do likewise to the hopes of millions of taxpayers. Yes, our finance ministers can rival Hollywood’s MATinee idols.

Consider the scene as this high-grosser domestic product is set to begin. This morning, our paparazzi too will have massed outside Parliament House, trampling over one another to capture the stars of Indian democracy as they arrive in their flashing cars. There are enough Bollywood stars in a double role here, but the purely political ones seem to be in no less of a clinch with the cameras.

Sushma-ji will pause to smile coyly for TV before she sweeps into Central Hall wearing her designer smugness. The beauteous Brinda Karat of the CPM is, of course, perfectly at home on the Red carp. Glamorous Renuka Chowdhury will glide up imperiously like a ship in full silken sail. The picture of poise even in the face of an Arnab onslaught, she is unlikely to trip like Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence did last Sunday, causing the bottom tier of her Dior gown to come apart. Hoping to cause the same embarrassment, the opposition benches will be waiting to rip the frills off PC’s veshtied interests.

But Oscar night and this Budget morn are similar not merely in what Naipaul may have called ‘The Predictability of Arrival’. As the lead players of the different parties and their supporting cast take their places inside Parliament and the much-awaited event unfolds, you will be struck by the parallels in the two scripts.

The Budget speech may not be a ‘night of surprises’ as Sunday’s was. It will not be punctuated by beneficiaries of his largesse breaking into demented surprise, and rushing up to the well of the House to hysterically thank Mr Chidambaram, his government and his istri-walla. But, ladies and gentlemen and all those who are neither, please recognise the magic of Budgetwood which we are gathered here to honour this morning — the epic conflict between fiscal prudence and populist compulsions, the romance of the deficit, the drama of subsidies, the mystique of MODVAT…

The finance minister will launch his operation at an hour less sinister than Zero Dark Thirty, but someone’s going to die in his taxation raid. Let’s see if he liquidates black money, the long-time terror of the Indian economy — and of the UPA government in a pre-election year. He certainly hopes to be as successful in his mission as the US Navy Seals in their killing of Osama bin Laden captured in Kathryn Bigelow’s much-nominated, but little-awarded film shot in our own backyard.

Or, as he seeks to rescue the Congress party from being held to ransom by the BJP on this issue of covert wealth, the FM’s Budget drama could unfold more like Argo, Ben Affleck’s Best Picture winner based on the CIA rescue of six US diplomats during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Either way, our PC deserves the Best Actor Oscar; indeed with his tall, lean frame, his cool statesman-like demeanour, and with a make-up artist as skilled as Danny Day-Lewis’s, he could even pass off as Lincoln. In this role, he would have to bring about structural reforms and put us under the coveted slavery of overseas investors.

Finally, all of us fervently hope that Mr Chidambaram’s budget will have Silver Linings, and not turn out to be Pi in the sky, or, worse, a Skyfall on our heads.

***Alec Smart said: “At this rate, we’ll have to call it ‘Face-off-Book’.”

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metropolis on Saturday. It now appears on the Edit Page of the Times of India, every Thursday. It takes a sly dig at whatever has inflated political/celebrity egos, and got public knickers in a twist that week. It makes you chuckle, think and marvel at the elasticity of the English language. Bachi Karkaria also writes Giving Gyan in the Mumbai Mirror, and its fellow publications in other cities. It is a shooting-from-the-lip advice column to the lovelorn and otherwise torn, telling them to stop cribbing and start living -- all in her her branded pithy, witty style.

Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metr. . .

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Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metropolis on Saturday. It now appears on the Edit Page of the Times of India, every Thursday. It takes a sly dig at whatever has inflated political/celebrity egos, and got public knickers in a twist that week. It makes you chuckle, think and marvel at the elasticity of the English language. Bachi Karkaria also writes Giving Gyan in the Mumbai Mirror, and its fellow publications in other cities. It is a shooting-from-the-lip advice column to the lovelorn and otherwise torn, telling them to stop cribbing and start living -- all in her her branded pithy, witty style.

Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metr. . .